Linking to Live Previews

Envato Customers Purchases and Subscriptions
1

Hi everyone,

I am frequently buying HTML themes for websites I build for my e-commerce customers, but it has became increasingly time consuming to constantly search through the 8,000+ themes looking for the best match.

So I have been thinking of making my own “index” of selected themes, focused on e-commerce, for various domains (e.g. fashion, electronics, food, cosmetics, mall-type sites etc.), but what will be even better is if I can put previews on my company’s website to the short listed themes (which will probably still be in the hundreds), where a preview will consist of a small picture of the home page, product page and collection page, that links to the respective page of the theme live preview published by the theme designer (preferably without the iframe as it is extremely distracting and I don’t want my customer to have a Buy Now button in their face, as typically we buy the theme and setup the website for them).

I do realize that sometime there are links in the live theme previews back to Themefores, and my customers can potentially figure out that we are buying the themes from Themeforest, but I am not concerned about it, as long as it is not in their face (like with the iframe bar).

So my question is, can I do this? Are there any rules against linking to the live previews, or making thumbnail previews of live previews? Are there any requirements for such linking, e.g. do I need to put the author’s name near the link or something similar? When a customer likes a particular theme and orders a website, I will of course buy the theme from Themeforest. The way I see it, there shouldn’t be any legal problem, but want to be sure.

I don’t know how everybody else works, but I typically search through the thousands of themes looking to find few suitable themes for my client, then I email them links to the live previews to have a look and pick the one they like best, then we buy the theme and work on it until we make it into the final site. Problem with this approach is that each live preview is structured differently, there is no consistent way to see the product / collection pages, some themes don’t even have links to them from the home page, and the ones that do, there is no consistency where those links are, and have to explain to the customer where to click (theme specific) to see what, or send them number of direct links to each template, straight to the relevant pages / options. This is very time consuming and I would like to streamline this, and have highly structured previews, where one can quickly see the key pages without theme-specific instructions.

Look forward to some constructive feedback!

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I don’t see why you couldn’t as long as you are linking to the authors demo site.

From a business perspective i still think it is wrong to buy sites for clients rather than have them purchase it, as should you part ways then they cannot access any subsequent updates or suppprt.

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Charlie4282, thanks for your feedback!

Yes, the intent is to link to the author’s demo site, not to copy anything from it.

Regarding the “business perspective”, we use custom-built platform, and if the customer decides to part ways, they have much more serious problems than the 20 USD or so theme that they may need to re-purchase. Also we never do updates after new releases since the risk of something going wrong is too high to justify such updates, and we also do heavy modifications to make the themes work with our platform, which will have to be redone. It is maybe an option when one is using a platform-specific themes, but for generic HTML themes, updates are not practical, for us at least.